The existence of ‘hybrid regimes’ occupying a grey zone between liberal democracy and closed authoritarianism is firmly established. This conceptual category is designed to capture those political regimes utilising democratic institutions, such as elections, albeit in a substandard way. Such a label has been frequently applied to Southeast Asia; a region presently comprised of three ‘competitive authoritarian’ regimes (Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore) and two ‘hegemonic authoritarian’ regimes (Laos, Vietnam). Despite being conceptualised for their hybridity, which implies democracy exists in some way, these regimes are still ‘recalcitrant’ to democratisation (Emmerson 1995). This is indicative of how contestation and participation do exist, but in varying degrees of deficiency. In Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore, for example, the incumbent regimes deliberately dilute the capacity of opposition parties to win office, intentionally infringe upon civil liberties and regularly abuse state resources to create an uneven playing field. This helps explain why the 2015 election victory of Myanmar’s National League for Democracy was nothing short of an anomaly for opposition parties in the region. In Laos and Vietnam, by comparison, the incumbent regimes legally bar opposition parties from existing, violate basic civil liberties through the use of overt repression and monopolise access to resources, media and the law. So what exactly is democratic about Southeast Asia’s pool of authoritarian regimes? Given the present state of contestation and participation, it is clear that a more critical examination is required into how the very institution that gives rise to the use of hybrid labels — in this case, elections – actually sustains authoritarian rule.

This means studying the utility of elections from the functional perspective of authoritarian regimes, rather than democratic regimes. The question then becomes how ruling parties use elections to prolong their stay in power and, by extension, resist democratisation. An important contribution in this regard is Gerschewski’s (2013) theory of autocratic stability. In seeking to explain why some regimes survive and others perish, he assigned casual importance to co-optation, legitimation and repression. These pillars do not exist from the outset, but must be developed and reinforced in order to achieve inter-complimentary. A key problem, however, is that legitimation remains neglected by comparison to the other pillars. For a variety of normative and substantive reasons, Gerschewski (2013: 19) lamented how ‘only anecdotal evidence is available as to why legitimation matters’. Set against the backdrop of flawed elections, this article addresses this deficit.

It uses the case of Singapore to explain how elections can be employed to gain legitimacy and, thus, maintain authoritarian rule. Since 1959, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has sanctioned more defective elections than its counterparts in Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Vietnam.¹ Despite such manipulation and misconduct, a majority of citizens have conferred legitimacy on the PAP because of its performance, governance as well as its values and ideology. A lack of fair electoral contestation, by contrast, has very few consequences for its legitimacy. This is indicative of Singapore’s status as a ‘pathway case’ containing both the cause and outcome of interest – a legitimation mechanism employed in perpetual support of autocratic stability.² The value of Singapore – in case study terms – is further denoted by its status as a model for other authoritarian regimes, many of which seek to replicate the PAP’s success by fusing flawed elections to a market-orientated economic system and a communitarian ethos (Ortmann and Thompson 2014). So by understanding how one of the most enduring authoritarian regimes has achieved legitimacy, democracy promotion may be more effectively targeted in those regimes following it. This is an especially prevalent issue given the ‘democratic recession’ now underway (Diamond 2015).

The central argument of this article is that PAP has employed flawed elections to acquire autonomous legitimacy. This term captures how authoritarian regimes utilise the space provided by elections to feign conformity to established rules and/or shared beliefs about the maintenance of political power. Since 1963, the PAP has successfully secured a normative commitment from citizens to obey its authority and acquiesce to the political status-quo. This is manifested in the procurement of a ‘mandate’ from citizens, be it event response, policy execution and/or reward collection. The gradual institutionalisation of this function has subsequently been integral to a regime stabilisation process predicated on reciprocal reinforcement, which combines autonomous legitimation with targeted co-optation and low intensity repression. Far from being mere window dressing or a precursor to democratisation, the inconvenient truth is that elections are far more open to the way political power is distributed and organised in a given context. Indeed, this article shows that they are neither institutionally predisposed to democracy or anathema to the legitimation of authoritarian regimes.

Please click here to read the full “The autocratic mandate: elections, legitimacy and regime stability in Singapore” article in The Pacific Review by Griffith Asia Institute Research Fellow Dr Lee Morgenbesser.